Much of what’s known as ‘AI’ has nothing to do with progress — it’s about lobbyists pushing shoddy digital replacements for human labour that increase billionaire’s profits and make workers’ lives worse.
A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.
A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it’s what’s selling for some reason?
The former is important, but attracts little attention from the tech & mainstream press, is not heavily marketed by major corporations to other corporations and the general public, and makes VCs fall asleep. Whereas the latter gets ALL the coverage, marketing, and gives VCs big fat boners. My comment expresses my bewilderment at this state of affairs (hence the “for some reason?”). You want to white-knight machine learning, expert systems and pattern recognition? Call VentureBeat, Andressen-Horowitz, PitchBook, and TechCrunch. And while you’re at it, tell them to stop vaporizing genAI slop.
A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.
A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it’s what’s selling for some reason?
The latter isn’t even selling, just used because it is free to use or they jammed it into an existing ecosystem like Copilot.
The former isn’t “kind of interesting” and there are lots and lots of daily use cases solved by AI that are much much more than “kind of interesting”.
What a simple way to try to downplay it by calling it only kind of interesting.
The former is important, but attracts little attention from the tech & mainstream press, is not heavily marketed by major corporations to other corporations and the general public, and makes VCs fall asleep. Whereas the latter gets ALL the coverage, marketing, and gives VCs big fat boners. My comment expresses my bewilderment at this state of affairs (hence the “for some reason?”). You want to white-knight machine learning, expert systems and pattern recognition? Call VentureBeat, Andressen-Horowitz, PitchBook, and TechCrunch. And while you’re at it, tell them to stop vaporizing genAI slop.
Sure, I’m just hoping smart people can see through the bullshit and call it out instead of treating all “AI” the same.